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The current format of the NRL doesn’t allow for each team to play each other twice. Doing that would mean extending the season by another six weeks and, even if they players were up for that (which they are not), as an armchair analyst, I don’t think I could cope.

This means that not every team’s schedule is the same. For twenty-four games, each teams plays each other once and plays a second game against nine other teams. The NRL has no particular interest in trying to provide the mythical “balanced schedule” that would be fair for all teams and prefers to use the opportunity to use a doubling up of rivalry games to generate commercial returns.

This might seem grossly unfair, especially if your team has to play the premiers twice, but it is what it is. What I’m interested in looking at this week is how slanted the schedules are and who will have an easier time of the 2019 NRL season and who will have to do it the hard way.

Last year, I did a series of graphs which told each NRL team’s history in the top flight since 1998. Despite expectations, it was pretty well received compared to the one I was expecting to generate a bit of interest.

Now that we have all of the Queensland Cup results, I thought I’d run the same exercise. I don’t expect all that much interest but I think it’s a shame that the Queensland Cup doesn’t garner more attention. The days of 30,000 attending the BRL grand final in the 1980s has been replaced by less than 10,000 turning up to the equivalent event in the 2010s, crushed under the homogenisation of rugby league culture in Brisbane and Queensland thanks to the twin-headed Orthrus* of the Maroons and the Broncos.

Part of the solution is to create some meaningful content about it and we’ll see more of it on this website this year. This post is the starting point, literally charting the competition’s history from its inception in 1996 through the turbulent early 00s period and into the relatively stability – dare I say, optimism – of the last ten years.

I had meant to do some wrap-up posts after I got back from my honeymoon but it felt like the moment had passed, being two or three weeks after the grand final, and I didn’t have much to say other than the navel gazing stuff that people really don’t care about it.

Using the same format I used during the rep weekend, this is the finals preview-ish post.

I didn’t get to do all the analysis I wanted to because I’ve run out of time. By the time this gets published, I should be somewhere in or around California starting my honeymoon, which I think should probably take priority. I won’t be filing from America (in fact I probably won’t see any rugby league for six weeks) but I will be back in October or November to do some post-season stuff.

While I was sleeping off my Napa-headbutt-induced apoplexy (again), the Catalans Dragons, from Perpignan in the south of France, won the Challenge Cup at Wembley. They became the first non-English team to do so since the competition’s inception in 1896. It’s an amazing milestone in the game’s reconstruction in France and the slow globlisation of the sport. In the last two seasons, we’ve seen:

The first pro rugby league team in the Americas

PNG Hunters won the Queensland Cup

Fiji and Tonga made the World Cup semi-finals

Catalan Dragons won the Challenge Cup

For the rugby league lefties – as Mascord likes to call them – all that’s required now is a Warriors NRL premiership, which remains a possibility but perhaps not likely, the promotion of at least Toronto, if not also London and Toulouse, to the Super League and a couple of successful end of season Tests. Should we at least get a Wolfpack promotion and Test matches, we could call 2018 a qualified success.

And then Souths won a scrum against the feed, which made me forget all the other items of interest that’s happened in the NRL this year, e.g. Immortals, retirements of future Immortals, topsy-turvy results, Blues winning Origin and a new women’s premiership.